Authors: Tim Butcher
Since leaving Kalemie, we had been running due west,
following a ridge line above the north hank of the Lukuga River. I
had been told we would turn due north near the village of
Niemba, a tiny place memorable only because it was the site of an
important bridge on the old railway - the one used, at various
times through the twentieth century, by my mother, Evelyn
Waugh and the swashbuckling gunboat crews from the Royal
Navy. Come the twenty-first century and the railway has been forgotten as a means of travel, mainly because the bridge at Niemba
had been washed away by floods. But it was still strategic enough
to attract the attention of warring factions and for two years,
around 2001, there had been a great deal of fighting in the area.
This explained why, when we arrived at a fork in the track - the
first junction we had seen in eighty kilometres since Kalemie -
we found a soldier in the uniform of the Congolese army sitting
under a tree. I have no idea how long he had been there, how he
was resupplied or how he protected himself. The Congolese army
has no aircraft or helicopters, and so he must have made his way
there on foot along the same awful track we had used. I did not
get the chance to find out, because Benoit clearly saw in the
uniformed soldier the potential for problems. Gunning the engine
on his bike, he swept past the soldier before he could gather his
wits and try to stop us. Benoit was sticking to the tactic of only
stopping to explain yourself if you really have to. He chose the
right-hand, northward track and accelerated. Odimba stuck close enough behind to be whipped in the face by branches dislodged
by Benoit. I looked over my shoulder just as the bush enveloped
us once more, to see the soldier hopping up and down shouting
and waving his gun.
Grinning like a naughty schoolchild who has got away with a
prank, I began to feel more comfortable. Bumping along on the
back of Odimba's bike, I noticed the landscape begin to change.
After the ups and downs of the earlier ridge track, we were now
crossing flatter savannah. The track was just wide enough for
people to walk single file, but the ground was beaten hard and
flat, so we scooted along faster than at any stage during the
journey so far.
For tens of kilometres we saw no villages or signs of life,
slowing only when the track crossed a stream or river. These
crossings became the curse of the journey because no sooner had
we picked up speed than we had to slow, stop and pick our route
over the waterway. There were scores of them. In some places
branches had been felled to form a primitive bridge, but each
crossing was hazardous, and countless times I had to jump off the
back of the bike and help drag the two bikes across. I saw why any
bike bigger than 100cc would be too cumbersome and heavy to
manhandle through the eastern Congo.
The journey settled into this routine, allowing me to think
about the next hazard, Mulolwa and its mai-mai. I kept looking
over Odimba's shoulder to anticipate the moment when we
reached the village and had to start negotiations.
Suddenly, I saw Benoit slow as he rode into a clearing in the
bush. His helmeted head swung from side to side as he took in the
scene. We were up alongside him in an instant and I could see
what he was looking at. There were the burned remains of dozens
and dozens of huts. The outline of each dwelling was marked in
a ring of black ash and charred thatch around soil beaten hard and
flat. In between the ruins there was nothing - no furniture, no
pots, no possessions, nothing.
It would be an exaggeration to say the ruins were still
smouldering, but the air still had a tang of acrid smoke. Whatever
happened here had not happened a very long time ago. I looked
at Benoit and saw his eyes stretched wide-open behind his
goggles. He was in shock.
`Let's not wait around here. Let's go,' he said.
The village was huge, running alongside the track for at least a
kilometre. Stanley had described villages in this area as big as
British towns, made up of scores of simple huts arranged around
the brown, beaten-earth version of an English town square.
Mulolwa was one of the largest bush settlements I had seen, but
there was not a soul around. We hurried past as fast as we could,
through a forest void now occupied by nothing but ash circles.
Finally we plunged back into the bush on the far side of the
village. It felt like sanctuary.
For several hours we continued to make good time. The bush
level was steadily being raised by taller and taller trees as we
approached the northern edge of Katanga province and prepared
to enter Maniema province. Maniema's reputation for cannibalism, which Stanley noted repeatedly in his writings, continued to
the modern era. In the 1960s it was in Maniema that thirteen
Italian airmen of the United Nations were killed and eaten, their
body parts smoked and made available at local markets for weeks
after the slaughter. Benoit assured me that we would be safe, if we
made it in one piece to Maniema. It was Katanga that scared
Benoit.
I was watching the slowly changing forest when Odimba's bike
suddenly coughed and died on us. There was something horrible
and ominous about the sudden silence. Out here in remotest
Katanga, silence meant no engine, no bike, no chance of getting
out.
Odimba remained unperturbed. Together we heaved the bike to
a flat section of track and by the time Benoit had come back to find out what the problem was, Odimba had unpacked an oily rag
wrapped around his tool collection. It might not have passed
muster in an engineering support vehicle on the Paris-Dakar
rally, but his battered pliers and rusty spanners were up to our
needs. He undid the fuel line running out of the petrol tank,
skilfully placing the empty plastic bottle, which Benoit had been
so careful to keep this morning, underneath to catch the sprinkle
of petrol as it leaked from the bottom. He handed it to Benoit, who
delicately poured the teaspoonful back into the tank. With no
chance of any fuel supplies until Kasongo, 400 kilometres away,
we could not afford to lose a drop.
Odimba continued to fiddle with the guts of the bike. I heard
him say something about the carburettor and the fuel line, but in
essence the problem was this: the petrol sellers in Kalemie had
given us dirty fuel. At one point Odimba put his lips to a pipe and
blew. Chunks of grit flew out the other end. Benoit smiled.
The fuel line was blocked. That will have cleared it,' he said.
As the pair put away their tools I felt a sense of being watched.
Turning round, I was shocked to see that we were not alone. A
man in rags was watching us, leaning heavily on an old bicycle
laden with large plastic containers. He asked if I had any water. I
handed over my bottle and he raised his lean face upwards. The
sun gleamed on cheeks taut from hunger. He skilfully poured in
a mouthful without actually touching the bottle to his lips. He
thanked me and prepared to continue on his way, but I asked him
where he was heading.
`I am walking to Kalemie. I am a palm-oil trader. My name is
Muke Nguy.'
I was stunned. He still had well over 100 kilometres to walk
before reaching Kalemie.
`I have already walked two hundred kilometres. It has taken me
sixteen days.'
I found his words difficult to take in. He was on a 600-kilometre round trip through heavy bush in the equatorial heat, with no
food and no water. His bicycle was so heavily laden with palm oil
that it had long stopped functioning as a means of personal travel.
He could not even get to the seat and, even if he had, I noticed the
pedals were missing. His bicycle was a beast of burden, a way to
haul goods through the jungle. If the thin, snaking bush tracks
were the veins of the Congo's failed economy, Muke and his
heavy burden were just one, solitary blood vessel. He could not
afford to bring along food or water when every possible corner of
carrying space was used to maximise the load. The only things on
the bike I could see that were not tradable were a battered silver
bicycle pump, a roll of woven grass matting and a coil of ivy.
`I drink when the path crosses streams, and at night I eat what I
can find in the hush. I have my mat to sleep on, but sometimes
the insects are very strong and they eat me at night. If I get sick, I
have no medicine.'
He smiled when I asked him what the loop of ivy was for. 'That
is from a rubber tree. If I have a flat, I break the ivy and a glue
comes out that will mend the puncture. It is the repair kit of the
forest.' For the first time his gaunt face softened to a smile.
I have always fancied myself as a long-distance athlete. I am
large and slow, but at least I have stamina. After that conversation with Muke, I no longer have any illusions about the extent
of my stamina. I could not conceive of the strength - physical
and mental - needed on a forty- or fifty-day round trip through
disease-ridden tropical forest. And it was not as if the rewards
were huge.
`I carry eighty, maybe a hundred litres of oil. Maybe I can make
ten or fifteen dollars profit when I get to Kalemie. So I spend my
money there on things we do not have at home, like salt or lakefish. When I get home, I will see my family for the first time in
months and sell some of the salt for another ten or fifteen dollars
profit.'
All this effort for $30 and a fish supper. I was stunned. Congolese like Muke are out there now, as I write this, sleeping in
the bush, swatting insects, kneading blisters on unshod feet,
toiling along a Ho Chi Minh trail of survival that shows just how
willing many Africans are to work their way out of poverty.
Muke then asked me something.
`Did you see any soldiers? Any gunmen on the road from
Kalemie? Because if they see me they will take what they call
"tax". Maybe a litre of oil, or maybe what is in my pockets, or
maybe even more. Sometimes I can lose all of my profit in a
second because in the Congo there is no law.'
Muke was only one of many bicycle hauliers that I saw. Some
carried canisters of palm oil, a few carried meat - antelope or
monkey, sometimes still bloody, but often smoked - and there
was even one with thirty or so African grey parrots in home-made
cages. The haulier proudly said he was going to make the long
and perilous journey from eastern Congo all the way to Zanzibar,
more than 1,000 kilometres to the east, where he might get $50 a
bird from tourists. It echoed the slave era, when Stanley saw Arab
slavers in this region driving chain gangs of prisoners for the same
long march to Zanzibar to be sold.
By late afternoon we were making much better progress. Benoit
had given up on making Kabambarre by nightfall, but he was
confident we could get out of Katanga and deep into Maniema
before stopping. His confidence untied the knot in my stomach
and for the first time all day I began to feel hungry. Since 4.30 a.m.
none of us had eaten anything, although I had been nursing on my
precious bottles of filtered water, gulping every so often and
sharing with Odimba.
The track continued across flat ground, but the savannah began
to blend with greater numbers of high-canopy trees. Stanley
noted that while Swahili had just one word for forest, the tribal
language of Maniema had four special words - Mohuru, Mwitu,
Mtambani and Msitu - for jungle of increasing impenetrability. I had brought a pocket-sized Global Positioning System machine to
record my exact route. Every so often I took it out and read the
display. It told me were tracking almost due north, but were still
a few degrees south of the Equator and the true rainforest.
My backside was beginning to ache and I began to daydream of
a comfortable car seat, instead of the sliver of hard plastic I was
perched on, bracing my buttocks each and every time Odimba
swerved. I thought of Talatala, a raunchy short story published
about the Congo in the 1940s by Georges Simenon, the Belgian
author and creator of Maigret. Simenon's contempt for the
Congolese colonialists was clear. He satirised the small-minded
bureaucrats, who insisted on wearing a stiff collar and tie at
remote stations deep in the bush, and the double standards of
colonials who slept with their Congolese maids, but expected
their European wives to remain faithful. The thing that came back
to me as we made our way through the bush was Simenon's
description of road travel. In Talatala an eccentric retired British
army officer keeps a racing car at his elephant-training farm in
eastern Congo, driving at high speeds down jungle roads. And the
other characters all move freely around the place, driving long
distances between coffee plantations and border posts and
colonial offices. That part of Simenon's work was entirely
plausible half a century ago, but today it would be pure fiction.
When Kalemie's cotton factory was working, it was supplied
with raw cotton from the area I was now entering. Warmer and
wetter than the lakeside, this region was perfect for cotton
growing. The raw material would be collected by lorry and driven
from here to Kalernie. The tracks I travelled along were about as
lorry-unfriendly as it is possible to be. During the colonial era, the
Belgian administration set up an army of cantonniers or workmen, who were responsible for every kilometre of the colony's
road network. Paid a small monthly retainer, thousands of
cantonniers across the country would keep the roads free from
the advancing jungle, the culverts clear of debris and the bridges in sound working order. By 1949 the colonial authorities boasted
111,971 kilometres of road across the Congo. By 2004 I doubt if
there were more than 1,000 kilometres left in the entire country.
The hours dragged. My backside got more and more numb, and
adrenalin struggled to contain my hunger. After darkness fell,
Benoit started to look for somewhere to spend the night. He
turned on his bike's headlight and I watched it sweep the dark
forest, searching for a friendly village. After a couple of false
leads, where he announced the village was too big or too spread
out, he pronounced himself satisfied with a settlement called
Mukumbo. I checked the distance on the bike's odometer and my
GPS. After sixteen hours of travel we had covered just 211
kilometres from Kalemie, and were not yet halfway to Kasongo.